The Citadel Read Free Page B

watched carefully as his copilot struggled to keep them on a straight line. They finally slowed enough so the copilot could taxi the plane over to where several other smaller C-119 aircraft were parked along with a cluster of fuel trucks.

As they came to a halt, the copilot kept the engines running, which was against normal regulations during refueling, but they had all learned that regulations developed outside of Antarctica rarely worked well in this forbidding climate. They needed to keep the engines running to keep heat flowing to the cargo bay, and more important, to prevent them from seizing up if allowed to cool too much.

Vannet looked out the window as anonymous figures in bulky cold-weather clothing hooked hoses up to the fuel points and began pumping the precious liquid in.

He noted a man dressed in a red parka standing in the shadow of a parked C-119, simply staring at the plane. For some reason, Vannet felt uncomfortable with that. He turned his head upon hearing a tap at the cockpit door. Captain Whitaker stuck his head in.

"Anxious to get home, I suppose?" he asked.

"Damn right," Vannet replied. "In two days we'll be back in the sun and surf."

Whitaker nodded. "Have a safe flight. You and your men did a great job. My superiors will be forwarding letters of commendation for you and your crew to your headquarters."

That was the least they could do, Vannet thought, to pay them back for spending four months living isolated in a damn Quonset hut buried under the snow at High Jump Station and flying a load every time the weather cleared. "I appreciate that."

Captain Whitaker disappeared down the stairwell, and the loadmaster slammed shut the personnel door behind him. Vannet looked out the window. The man in the red parka was gone. He looked about and then spotted the man walking next to Whitaker, heading toward a C-119 whose engines were also running.

Vannet turned to his copilot and navigator. "Do we have clearance to go?"

The navigator's face split in a wide grin. "We have clearance, and the weather looks good all the way to New Zealand, sir."

"All right. Let's go home."

They turned their nose into the wind and powered up. Soon the seaplane was in the air and over the ice-covered Ross Sea. New Zealand was ten hours away, due north.

Vannet piloted the first three hours, as they slowly left the white ice behind and finally made it over clear ocean, specked with small white dots far below, indicating icebergs. At that point, Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot and got out of his seat. "I'm going to take a walk in back and get stretched out."

Vannet climbed down the stairs. The loadmaster and his assistant were lying on the web seats strung along the side of the plane, sleeping. The eighty engineers that they had supplied for four months were stretched out in every available spot, everyone trying to catch some sleep.

Vannet walked all the way to the rear, where the ramp doors met, rolling his head on his shoulders, shaking off the strain of three straight hours in the pilot's seat and carefully stepping over slumbering bodies.

His mind was on his wife and young daughter waiting for him in Honolulu, when the number two engine exploded with enough force to shear the right wing at the engine juncture.

The MARS immediately adopted the aerodynamics of a rock, rolling over onto its right side. Vannet was thrown up in the farthest reaches of the tail as the plane plummeted for the ocean from 25,000 feet. He blinked blood out of his eyes from a cut in his forehead and tried to orient himself. Men were screaming and there were jumbled bodies everywhere.

Vannet's primary thought was to try and crawl back up to the cockpit, but his legs wouldn't obey his mind. There was a dull ache in his lower back and no feeling below his waist. He scrambled at the cross beams along the roof of the aircraft with his hands, trying to pull himself forward, climbing over other men at times.

Vannet was twenty feet from